by Clive Barker
Rosa demanded to be set down once they were in the house and went with a few stumbling steps to the nearest wall. There she passed her hands over the surface, leaning a little closer to sniff at it. “Shit,” she said. “He’s covered the wall in shit.” She called to Frannie, “Is it all like this?”
“As far as I can see.”
“Ceiling the same?”
Frannie looked up. “Yes.” Rosa laughed. “Is it different from the way you remember it?”
“I don’t much trust my memories, but I don’t think it was a sewer when I was last here. Rukenau must have done this.” She started to probe the wall with her fingers, pulling away cobs of filth once she had her fingers deep enough. There was a source of light beneath the excrement, Frannie saw, a luminescence that seemed to ripple as Rosa worked, as though it sensed that somebody was laboring to unveil it. This was no illusion.
The larger the hole Rosa tore in the wall became, the more apparent the muscular motion in the light. And there were colors in the brightness, brilliant darts of turquoise and tangerine.
The caked dirt was no match for this energy, now that it sniffed its liberation. What had first been a rain of small cobs of filth rapidly escalated, as Rosa’s labors inspired the light to shake itself lose. Cracks spread up and out from the place where Rosa had begun, the caked dirt losing its grip as word of revolution spread.
Frannie watched astonished as the process unfolded before her and, not for the first tune on this journey, wished Sherwood could have been at her side to share the sight. Particularly this: His Rosa, the woman he’d idolized, turning her hands to such transformative labor. Frannie felt blessed to witness it.
And as more and more of the mystery that Rukenau had concealed came into view, Frannie began to make some fledging sense of its nature. The colors that gleamed and shone in the wall were hints of living things. Nothing whole yet, but intimations: a flicker of stripes on a pulsing flank, the glitter of hungry eyes, a spreading canopy of wings. Nor were these presences going to be readily restrained, that much was already apparent.
They were too vital, too eager. The more ambitious of them were spreading into the room, spilling the echoes of their forms into the grateful air, like sparks flying from an uncontainable fire.
“Help me up,” Rosa demanded, and Frannie duly went to her aid, though she did so without looking at Rosa, she was so enraptured by the spectacle of burgeoning forms.
“We have to go and find Rukenau,” Rosa said, her thin fingers digging into Frannie’s shoulder. She reached up and touched Frannie’s face. “Are you looking at the world?” she said.
“Is that what this is?”
“This is the Domus Mundi,” Rosa reminded her. “And whatever you’re seeing now, there’s far finer to see. Now come on, I need your strength a little while longer.” She didn’t need to be carried any more; she had clearly gained some measure of vigor from being in the house. But her sight was not restored, and she needed Frannie to lead her, which Frannie was happy to do. By the time they had crossed the first chamber into the room beside it, the message of rebellion had overtaken them. A dry rain of dirt particles started to fall upon them as cracks opened in the vaulted ceiling, and the room was already brighter than the space they’d left, the blaze flickering from fissures on every side. There were sounds rising to accompany the spectacle, though, like the first hints of sight, they were at present undifferentiated, a murmur from which now and then a more specific noise would come. An elephant trumpeting, perhaps, a whale making song, a monkey howling in a churning tree—
But Rosa heard something closer to her heart.
“That was Steep,” she said.
There was indeed a human voice, afloat in the brimming sea of sounds. Rosa picked up her pace, the same word coming with every breath:
“Jacob. Jacob. Jacob. Jacob.”
Will couldn’t see what was happening between Rukenau and Steep—they were too far from him, their struggle obscured by the ropes—but he saw the consequences. The structure, for all its complexity, had not been built to withstand the struggle now going on inside it. Ropes were being pulled from their roots in the wall, bringing clods of dead dirt with them. Light and motion were coming in their stead, illuminating the spreading collapse.
Places where the burden of furniture was the heaviest were the first to go. A table came crashing down, claiming two of the more substantial platforms as it fell, delivering them all in splinters to the shaking ground. There were fissures here too, and shafts of roiling brightness coming to swell the sum of light. More than light, life. That was what Will saw in the swaths of unfurling color: the throb and shimmer of living things.
As the ropes and platforms continued to fall, he had sight of Jacob and Rukenau. They looked, he thought, like something Thomas Simeon might have painted: two spirits engaged in a life-and-death struggle on the shaking heights. Rukenau was by no means accepting his fate. He was using his ease among his perches to keep his body out of Steep’s way. But Jacob wasn’t going to be denied his quarry. Without warning he dropped to his knees and caught hold of the precarious lace of rope on which they swayed and shook it so hard that Rukenau pitched forward. Will saw Jacob’s knife hand rise up to meet the other man’s chest and, though he couldn’t see the weapon, Will knew by the shriek escaping Rukenau’s lips that the blade had found its home.
Rukenau started to topple, but as he did so caught hold of his executioner, so that they both fell, locked together, dividing the mesh with their combined weight as they hurtled to the ground.
The house shook Rosa stopped in her tracks and uttered a little sob. “Oh now,” she breathed. “What have you done?”
“What’s happened?” Frannie said.
She got no answer, but she no longer needed Rosa to locate Steep, because she heard him for herself, his voice unmistakable.
“Done now, are you?” he was saying. “Are you done?” Rosa was stumbling ahead of Frannie, who followed her through a narrow door into a trash-filled passage. Several times Rosa fell as she scrambled toward her destination, but she was up the instant after and out of the passage, with Frannie on her heels, into Rukenau’s chaotic chamber.
Will caught a motion out of the corner of his eye and was vaguely aware that somebody had entered, but he could not unglue his gaze from the sight on the ground long enough to see who it was.
Jacob had got to his feet and was tearing at the ropes that had caught about him as he fell. Rukenau had no hope of rising ever again, however. Though he was still alive, his body twitching, Jacob’s knife was buried in the man’s body and blood was coming from the wound in copious amounts. His filthy shirt and waistcoat were already completely soaked, and the blood was now pooling around him.
Will was still outside Jacob’s field of vision, but he knew he would not remain so for very long. Once the Nilotic looked his way, it would come and finish its threatened work. Though it was hard to look away, he turned his back and slipped off, choosing as his means of exit the door through which Ted had disappeared in pursuit of his wife. Only when he reached it did he think to look back across the chamber at those who’d lately entered, and there saw both Frannie and Rosa. Neither had eyes for him. Both were looking at Rukenau’s cavorting body.
Jacob had finally tired of that same sight, however, and looking up, turned his eyes on Will. Very slowly, he shook his head as if to say: Did you think you could escape me? Will didn’t wait for the creature to start in pursuit of him. He ran.
The same process of revolution was underway in every room as had begun in Rukenau’s chamber, the walls stripped of the concealing filth, the life beneath spilling into view. But there was something more startling still, Will realized. The walls, for all that they contained, were not solid. He could see to the left and right of him into rooms he’d never visited, rooms where the same message of liberation had come, and the house making its glories known. No wonder Jacob had trembled with remembrance in Eropkin’s ice palace; this was what he�
��d dimly recalled in that frigid bedroom. A site of exquisite lucidity, of which the palace, for all its glory, was but a remote echo.
Ahead of him now, the place to which Rukenau had superstitiously referred when speaking of how Ted’s wife had been lost. Seeing it in front of him, the source, the heart, he felt as he had on Spruce Street to the hundredth power. News of the world coming to him in all its abundance, like a blaze of light between dividing clouds, climbing in fierceness as the vapors melted away. Soon, he would be blinded, surely. But so be it. He would look until his eyes gave out; listen till his ears could take no more.
From somewhere behind him he heard the Nilotic calling for him. “Why are you running?” Jacob said to him. “There’s nowhere you can hide.”
It was true. Any chance of escaping detection was denied him now. But that was an insignificant price to pay for the bliss of moving through this marvelous place. He glanced behind him to find that Steep was no more than twenty yards away. It seemed to Will he could see the Nilotic’s form moving in the man, as though Steep’s addled flesh had caught the fever of revolution and was resigning its concealments.
His own body was doing the same thing, he thought; he could feel the fox in him, vulpes vulpes, rising as the hunt quickened—a last, primal transformation as he fled into the fire. And why not? The world made miracles like this every moment of every day: egg into chick, seed into flower, maggot into fly. Now man into fox? Was that possible?
Oh yes, said the House of the World. Yes, and yes, and always yes—
Rosa had halted a little way from Rukenau and waited until his thrashing subsided. Now it had. Now he lay still, except for his gasping chest, and his eyes, which went to the woman and fixed on her as well as they were able.
“Stay . . . away . . . from . . . me,” he said.
Rosa took his demand as her cue to approach, halting a yard from him. It seemed he was afraid that she intended him harm, because he used what little strength he had to haul his hand up to shield his face. She didn’t try to touch him however. “Such a very long time,” she said, “since I was here. But it doesn’t seem more than a year or two. Is that because we’re at the end of things? I think maybe it is. We’re at the end, and nothing that went before seems of any consequence.” Her words seemed to find an echo in Rukenau, because as she spoke, tears came. “What did I do to you?” he said. “Oh Lord.” He closed his eyes, and the tears ran.
“I don’t know what you did,” Rosa said. “I only want an end to it.”
“Then go to him,” Rukenau said. “Go to Jacob and heal yourself.”
“What are you saying?”
Rukenau opened his eyes again. “That you’re two halves of the same soul,” he said. She shook her head, not comprehending.
“You trusted me, you see; you said I was better company than you’d had in two hundred years.” He looked away from her and stared at the bright air above his head. “And once I had your trust I put you to sleep, and I spoke my liturgies and undid the sweet syzygy of your being. Oh I was proud of myself, playing God that way. Male and female madeth He.” Rosa let out a low moan. “Jacob’s a part of me?” she said.
“And you of him,” Rukenau murmured. “Go to him, and heal both of your spirits before he does more harm than even he can calculate.”
There was a man squatting in the passage ahead of Will, his hands clamped over his eyes so as to shut out the vision rising around him. It was Ted, of course.
“What the hell are you doing down there?” Will and the fox said to him.
He didn’t dare unstop his eyes, at least until Will demanded he do so. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Ted,” he said.
“Are you joking?” the man replied, uncovering his eyes long enough to confirm that he was talking to Will. “The place is coming down on our heads, for God’s sake.”
“Then you’d better find Diane pretty damn quick,” Will said. “And you’re not going to do it sitting on your ass. Get up and get moving, for God’s sake.” Shamed into action, Ted got to his feet, but kept his eyes half closed. Even so, he couldn’t help but flinch at the sights that were surging from the walls.
“What is all this?” he sobbed.
“No talking!” Will said, knowing Steep was closing on them, stride for stride. “Just get moving.” Even if they’d had the time to debate the visions brimming about them, Will doubted there was any explanation for them that fell within their frame of knowledge. The Nilotic had built a house of numinosities, that was all Will knew. The means by which it had done so was beyond his grasp, nor finally, was it important to know. It was the work of a sublime being, that was all that mattered—a holy mason whose labor had created a temple such as no priest had ever consecrated. If Will’s eyes ever distinguished the patterns moving around him, he knew what he would see: the glory of creation. The tiger and the dung beetle, the gnat’s wing and the waterfall. It was perhaps, not the house that smeared their particularities, but his brain, which would have perished from the sheer excess of all that these swelling clouds of life contained, had he seen them precisely.
“This . . . is such . . . a glorious . . . madness,” he gasped as he moved on with Ted, toward the source. And from that insanity a figure now emerged, a woman with a branch in one hand, heavy with figs, and in the other, clutched tightly, a fat salmon thrashing and glistening as though it had moments before been snatched from a river.
“Diane?” Ted said.
It was she. And seeing her ragged, tearstained husband the woman dropped her bounty and went to him, opening her arms.
“Ted?” she said, as though she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing. “Is it you?”
She might in other circumstances have been quite a plain woman. But the light loved her. It clung to her weight as her sodden clothes clung; it ran over her full breasts; it played around her groin and lips and eyes. No wonder she’d been seduced by the place, Will thought. It had made her radiant, glorifying her substance without cavil or complaint. She was impermanent, of course, no less than the fish or the figs. But in the space between birth and dissolution, this life called Diane, she was made marvelous.
Ted was a little afraid to put his arms around her. He held back, puzzling out what he was seeing.
“Are you my wife?” he said.
“Yes, I’m your wife,” she said, plainly amused.
“Will you come with me, out of here?” he asked her.
She glanced back the way she’d come. “Are you leaving?” she said.
“We all are,” Ted replied.
She nodded. “I suppose . . . yes, I’ll come with you,” she said, “if you want me to.”
“Oh.” He caught hold of her hand. “Oh God, Diane.” Now he embraced her. “Thank you. Thank you—” We’d better move, the fox murmured in Will’s head, Steep’s not far behind.
“I have to go,” he said to Ted, slapping him on the back as he moved on past the couple.
“Don’t go any further,” Diane said to him. “You’ll get lost.”
“I don’t mind,” Will told her.
“But it’ll be too much,” she replied. “I swear, it’ll be too much.”
“Thanks for the warning,” he said to her and, giving Ted a grin as he passed, walked on toward the heart of the house.
XV
i
Frannie had not gone with Rosa in pursuit of Steep. She’d stayed in Rukenau’s chamber, watching in astonishment as the walls shed their covering. It was not the safest place to be by any means, not with the dirt and rope and furniture overhead in steady collapse. But she had no intention of taking shelter, not when she had risked so much to be here. She would watch the process to the end, however heavy the downpour became.
Her presence did not go unnoticed. A minute or so after Rosa’s departure, Rukenau turned his head in Frannie’s direction and, focusing what was left of his sight upon her, asked her if Rosa had found Jacob yet. Not yet, she told him. She could see the object of his inquiries making h
er way through the unfurling walls in pursuit of Jacob; she could see Jacob too, moving in the brightness. The figure that truly caught her attention, however, was Will, who was furthest from her, but who by some trick of place or sight, was in sharper focus than either Rosa or Jacob, his form perfectly delineated as he walked the brightening air.
I’m losing him, Frannie thought. He’s going away from me and I’ll never see him again.
The man on the ground in front of her said, “Won’t you come a little closer? What’s your name?”
“Frannie.”
“Frannie. Well then, Frannie, could you raise me a little? I want to see my Nilotic.”
How could she refuse him? He was beyond doing her any harm. She knelt down beside him and put her arm under his body. He was heavy, and wet with blood, but she felt strong and she’d never been squeamish, so it wasn’t a difficult task to lift him up as he’d requested, until he had a view through the veils of the house.
“Do you see them?” she asked him.
He managed a blood-red smile.
“I see them,” he said. “And that third? Is it Ted or Will?”
“That’s Will,” she said.
“Somebody should warn him. He doesn’t know what he’s risking, going so deep.”
In the cool furnace of the world, Will heard Steep call his name.
Once upon a time, he would have turned eagerly at the sound of that voice, hungry for the face that owned it. But there were finer sights to see all around him; the creatures whose designs had been abstractions until now were finally parading their forms before him. A flock of parrotfish broke against his face, a wave of flamingoes ruddied the sky; he waded ankle-deep through a lush field of otters and rattlesnakes.
“Will,” Steep said again.
Still he didn’t turn. If the creature strikes me down from behind, he thought, so be it, I’ll die with my head full of life. A boulder split before him, and spilled a bounty of chicks and apes; a tree grew around him, as though he were its rising sap and, spreading overhead, blossomed with striped cats and carrion crows.